Studies show that, without activities to engage their bodies and minds, nursing facility residents tend to decline more quickly. But a clever new device designed by UAB undergraduates aims to get residents moving, and interacting, through the power of videogames.

Alex Plazas, left, is pictured with University Innovation Fellows Haifa Al Harrasi, Joshua Lim, and Callista Cox. Alex Plazas, a sophomore in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, is one of four UAB students named University Innovation Fellows by Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. The students traveled to Silicon Valley in March for the University Innovation Fellows’ fifth annual meetup after completing six weeks of online training.

Many aspiring scientists wonder how they’ll find the right lab to launch their research career. Retta El-Sayed was pulled right in by a giant magnet.

Large, human cardiac-muscle patches created in the lab have been tested, for the first time, on large animals in a heart attack model. This clinically relevant approach showed that the patches significantly improved recovery from heart attack injury.